In a speech at the Venice Film Festival at special screening of his seminal noir thriller Blade Runner, Sir Ridley Scott, the legendary director of Alien, believes that science-fiction as a genre is dead, going the way of Westerns.

Sir Ridley believes that although the flashy effects of recent block-busters, such as The Matrix, Independence Day and The War of the Worlds, may sell tickets, that none can beat Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 epic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

We're delighted to share the news that Daily Galaxy posts syndicated by Reuters global news service have been viewed by over 200,000 readers this past week. Yesterdays post, A Post-Human Future -A Galaxy Insight is linked below.

A remote Indonesian cave has been found to contain previously undiscovered sculptures depicting the spiritual journey of Buddha.

The sprawling cave is a reminder of the rich Buddhist past in what is now the world's most populous Muslim nation.

The cave appears to have been a place of meditation for Buddhist monks. It was discovered more than two decades ago near Jireg village in East Java province, but had never been thoroughly explored because of its remote and difficult-to-reach location, said Dhamma Subho Mahathera of Shangha Theravada Indonesia.

While surface injuries can look gruesome, often the most serious medical dangers aren’t visible—such as an internal organ crushed in a car wreck, or maybe while wrestling a hostile alien. Star Trek fans will fondly recall how easy it is for doctors of the future to heal internal injuries. Apparently all you do is point a device at the body and push a button. Viola, as long as they weren’t totally dead to start with, you knew the character would be back vigorously exploring the universe by the end of the episode.

NASA scientists have now come out with a new and improved climate model, which factors in more variables than previous models. The new findings indicate that what are now the most severe storms and tornadoes will become increasingly common as the Earth’s climate warms.

Is there life on today? This question has been fiercely debated by scientists for the past thirty years.

The evidence sent back from by two Viking Landers in 1976 and 1977 was inconclusive. In fact, NASA's first press release about the Viking tests announced that the results were positive. The "labeled Release" (LR) experiments had given positive results. But after lengthy discussions in which Carl Sagan participated, NASA reversed its position, mainly because another experiment detected no organics in the soil.

A research team has for the first time ever discovered active DNA from living bacteria that are more than half a million years old, which may lead to a better understanding of the aging of cells and might even cast light on the question of life on Mars.

The bacteria, frozen in permafrost slowly respirate and repair their DNA, according to a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The process may explain how life persists over geologic time scales, the authors say.

Other scientists have discovered viable microbes that have been trapped in amber, salt or buried deep within the earth for tens to hundreds of millions of years, but how these ancient bacteria remained alive for so long under extreme conditions has remained a mystery.